Finding Mr Right
by Larbo
Summary: An entry to the Big Finish Short Trips competition. The lonely angel meets someone even lonelier than he, with surprising consequences for the universe...


Finding Mr Right

(_Author's Note: This was my second entry to the Big Finish "Short Trips" competition. I thought it the better of my two entries. Clearly Big Finish weren't huge fans, but I was more than happy with it. Enjoy..._)

It was a bar, and that was good enough. I walked inside, breathed in the odour of stale beer gratefully, and looked about for a free barstool. There was none, but four seconds later I was sitting in one. I had no money in my pockets. No need. Within half an hour I was on my third. An hour later, I was on my...well, it was more than three.

It was around then that he entered the place. There was a girl with him, pretty, young, American by the sounds of her. She looked thrilled to be here, which was, not to be unduly unkind, weird. She went to find a place while he came to the bar. I had a feeling even then, at the beginning, that of all the people lining that bar he'd stand beside me and be a little chatty.

"Two mineral waters please," he said jauntily as the barman quirked an eyebrow.

Around me, the buzz of conversation dipped noticeably.

"Ah," he continued gamely, "my mistake. New York, 1940s, after all. Two beers, please."

This change of direction served him well. He glanced across at me, if only to escape the withering glare of the barman. I caught sight of what he was wearing under his trenchcoat – garish, circus clothes, a patchwork of chaos. It was like he was wearing the 60s. "Nice evening," he offered, before leaning in conspiratorially. "How much _are_ two beers?"

"Don't worry about it. He won't ask you for the money."

"I doubt that," he replied wryly.

I grunted. Everyone always doubted it.

"Here you go, Mac," the barman growled, and pushed two glasses of brown liquid across the bar. I saw 'Mac' pat his pockets to presumably dig for his wallet, but the barman had already gone. By the time he looked up, all he was staring at were two glasses. I hoped he didn't stare too long. You tended to lose the nerve to drink them if you did that.

"You were right," he said.

"I'm always right," I wearily chimed back to him.

"An American who thinks he's always right – now there's a rarity."

Maybe it was the drink. I don't know. Maybe it was the fact that he was dressed like the kind of guy who doesn't care if he comes out of O'Hanrahan's alive or dead. All I knew was, I usually left it at that with people, but not with him.

"I don't think I'm always right. I am."

He was intrigued already. I could see the pretty girl's head poking up over the armpits of the crowd at the far edge of the place. Much longer on her own and the amorous vultures would quit circling and close in. But her companion for tonight had momentarily forgotten her.

"What's the spatial differential between charged protonic anti-matter and a baryonic particle with a negative polarity...rounded off to 2 decimal places?" he said, rattling off the words like they actually made sense.

I shrugged. "I don't care."

"Ah ha! What happened to I'm Always Right?"

"I am. And when I say I don't care about the question you just asked me, you better believe your _ass_ I'm right."

"And so what do you care about?"

Wow. If only he knew what kinda question that was. "I'd like to be wrong sometime," I said.

"Easy!" he beamed, and gestured to the beer glasses in front of him. "Repeat after me – these glasses are full of whiskey."

"These glasses are full of whiskey," I echoed, for his benefit if not for mine.

"There you go. No charge. Now, my companion looks rather agitated and some rather large men are moving worryingly quickly toward her, so goodbye for now, Mr Right."

He scooped up the glasses and disappeared into the throng. I found a bowl of peanuts on the bar and started idly flicking them. One. Two. Three. Four-

He was back, spluttering, right when I expected him to be, still holding both glasses, both of which were only minutely less full. "How did you -?" he began, before stopping. He looked me up and down properly for the first time. He seemed to be looking for the seams. "What are you?" he demanded. "Shape-shifter with transmogrification abilities? You're not one of the Urg-Yoths of Tarn, are you?"

I thought about it. "Nope."

He took out this thin, weird looking contraption and started waving it at me. It made a few noises. He looked at the bleeping thing, aghast. "You're human," he said eventually.

The barman rang a bell. "Last orders people," he announced. "Closing early tonight."

I frowned. "No you're not," I called back.

"Hey what the hell buddy, you're right!" he replied, suddenly enthused with new life. "Let's stay open til the cops come and _make _us shut!"

A raggedy cheer went up from the patrons. I saw the way 'Mac' was looking at me. I shrugged. "What?" I asked him. I noticed his demeanour had changed. I started to wonder who this guy was, with his crazy clothes and his British accent.

"What are you doing here?" he asked me. "What do you want?"

"Right now? The bar not to close."

"And later?"

I took a draught of beer and whistled through my teeth. "Probably some headache tablets."

He exploded. "You can't expect me to believe – with the powers you have…?!"

I looked at him. "Let me guess," I said, and wondered at the irony of the words. "You're some kinda time-travelling alien who roams the cosmos in a camouflaged spaceship, occasionally taking people along for the ride with you."

"You know that's true."

"No," and I smiled. "I know it's true _now. _It's like the beer and the whiskey, Mac – no matter what you were up until this point in time, from now on you're a time-travelling alien who roams the…ahh, all that stuff I just said. Even if _before_ you were just some kook who liked to dress up when he went to bars with pretty girls."

He scoffed at this. Everyone always did. "Poppycock," he said haughtily. "You're saying you've just _invented _my entire life? Wouldn't it be more likely that you have psychic abilities to go with your other talents?"

I sighed. Maybe I should have specified 'intelligent' when I did his bio. "OK Mac," I said, "you asked for it…" I looked around. "See those guys about to strike up a conversation with your friend?"

He looked, alarmed and guilt-ridden. "Peri!"

"Relax," I told him. "All those guys want to do is comment on how lovely her hair is. Watch."

We watched as the four guys advanced. Peri looked torn between fight or flight. And then the guys began talking, and we saw Peri look progressively confused, then bemused, then flat out astonished. She patted her hair, talking animatedly, gesturing to her fringe and by the looks of it taking her captive audience on an epic journey through how exactly it stayed split-end free. We saw patrons around the four guys look at them like they'd just sprouted extra heads.

I glanced over at Mac with a 'well?' kinda look on me. He drew himself up and turned on me, jabbing a finger at me accusingly. I got the impression he did that quite a lot.

"Simple psychic suggestion. A long way from inventing histories on a whim. It's not as if you said one of those men would turn out to be a half-mad cat in a big overcoat."

"But one of them _is_," I said mildly.

From behind us, there was the sound of frantic _meeeowling_, a girl squealing and a lotta guys saying a lotta impolite words.

A little later, O'Hanrahan's had closed for the night. Something about a barfight started by a small and terrified cat. I felt like stopping it, but everyone seemed to be having fun beating the hell out of each other. I knew no-one would be seriously injured though and that, when all was said and done, 'Big Earl' McGlinsky would turn up alive and well and most importantly, not a cat, and that everyone would put it down to drinks and hi-jinks.

We watched the harbour by the light of the dawn, all three of us. Ships came in, ships went out. So did people. So had I, kinda. It had seemed a good a place as any.

"Who are you?"

"You'll get there."

"Are there any limits on what you do?"

"Only what I choose not to do."

"Such as…"

"Well, I could feel bored one morning and predict the universe was going to come to an abrupt and fiery end in ten seconds time…"

"You're God, aren't you."

I didn't reply. He seemed to understand why. "You can't ever be wrong," he went on. "Because to be wrong…would be a contradiction of omnipotence."

"Usually depends what philosopher you're reading," I replied wryly. "But you're on the right lines."

"I don't believe in you, by the way," he said with sudden defiance. "And don't think you're going to get around that by existing."

I shrugged. If religious leaders for the last two thousand years had seen that shrug, they'd have been pretty pissed off. Screw 'em. Talk about _embarrassing_.

"Can't you just…say," and like they all did when putting words in my mouth, he put on this grand big voice, "I will be wrong in the next thing I say!"

I had a cigar in my hand. I took a draw on it now and blew out smoke luxuriously. "If I wanted the universe to wink out of existence, sure I could."

"Can you make a stone so-"

I stopped him with a look. "Don't even _start_ with that or I'll make one that'll be impossible for you to lift. Mainly because you'll be _under_ the damn thing."

"What have you done with Peri?" he asked, waving a hand in front of her face. She smiled dreamily and just kept looking out over the harbour.

"She'll be fine," I assured him. "She's not really ready for this."

"And I am?"

"Trust me. You'll go through a lot stranger nights than tonight."

"Thanks," he replied. "Now that'll come true too."

"Would have done with or without my help," I grinned, and decided to put him out of his misery. "And no..." I added, "I _didn't _make you up on the spot. You existed."

He seemed to inflate. I could practically see his sizeable ego pouring back in. "I knew that all along."

"Right."

"I watched a world be destroyed, once," he said suddenly. "I was made to by those who destroyed it. They did it on a whim, on a high, for kicks. Seven billion intelligent beings died on that world. I couldn't stop their deaths."

I nodded. Here it came. "And I could have?"

"The thought did occur."

"Do you know what my earliest memory is, Mac? Everyone has one, even a pretty old guy like you. Playing in a park or going to school or a birthday party. But my earliest memory – if you could call it that, I guess, because memory is imperfect and what I have, I'm sorry to say, is anything but – my earliest recollection is of nothingness. And you," and he heard my voice lose the accent and saw me change a little, "you, Gallifreyan, space-traveller, you imagine that nothingness is a concept you can grasp better than most, with the time you spend in the void between the worlds and the ages. But you can't. And if you ever came close, you'd be filling my head with your prayers day and night that you never came any closer, for it would drive you so helplessly, hopelessly insane that you'd tear yourself apart, throw yourself into the heart of oblivion that it might scatter you to the winds and never bring you any closer to the truth of what true nothingness can encompass. Loneliness, Mac. I existed. I thought, therefore I was, but I was _alone_. And out of that despair, out of that utter terrifying solitude I sought respite, and poured whatever talents I had into the sucking, terrible hungry _lack of nothing _surrounding me."

My voice trailed off. I could feel his gaze boring into me, could have felt it were I mortal, were I dead perhaps. I had his attention. I forced a smile.

"_There's_ a Creation myth that never made the school textbooks," I said, dropping the cigar to the wood below and crushing it underheel.

"So imagine," I continued, "imagine my bewilderment when this new thing, this Universe, flowered into existence around me, born not out of my noble all-seeing vision to bestow Creation upon the void but out of sheer goddamned despair. And a billionth of a nanosecond later, imagine how I felt when ten trillion new universes splintered off every single component atom, every single alternate reality, a trillion more every unimaginably small fraction of a moment, every single elementary particle its own coin spinning heads and tails and coming up both, for all eternity, and all of it mine. All of it."

Finally he found his voice to speak. He asked a question. I grinned. It was a good question. "Sure."

"Thank you," he said, blowing out smoke luxuriously. He coughed a little. "Cuban?"

"Naturally."

We stood there in silence for another few moments. Behind us, the city's heartbeat got a little stronger and a little louder as its daytime inhabitants roused themselves.

"In the bar," he said, "I asked you what you cared about, and you said you'd like to be wrong sometime."

"So I did."

"But you know that if you were wrong...wink, and out we go. So why do you want that?"

"How did you feel when the Therkan homeworld was destroyed before your eyes? And no, you don't have to answer that. You asked me how I could let that happen. You think that was _remarkable_, Mac? You think seven billion people being flash-fried out of existence was a bad day, cosmically? Imagine standing and being forced to witness acts like that every fraction of every second of every day. You know what other memory is a real standout to me? The first group of sentient beings to evolve in the multiverse did so – oh, it doesn't matter how long ago, or what name they gave themselves. And I was captivated by them! Enthralled! How I marvelled at this most wondrous miracle! But when they developed sentience, when that spark first came to them, something else came to them, found them, began to fester within them."

He looked down, couldn't meet my eyes. "Evil," he said.

"You got it. And at first, when I got over my shock and my horror, I was surprised, I was puzzled. I couldn't work it out. Where had it come from?" I laughed at my own stupidity. "Here I was, existing in a universe born out of my own despair not to be alone, my own terror at the void, and I was wondering where these emotions born of fear and loathing and hatred had sprung from. From _me_. Where else? And that's when I knew."

The skies darkened overhead, and I confess, okay, the sea might have gone a shade of red. A few frogs may have fallen on Fifth Avenue. It was a little careless of me, but I always got a little uptight when I thought about this.

"I knew that's how it would end. When that despair, that Creation-powering loneliness festered for long enough, and every sentient being was saturated with it. And when that happens, I'll wish I was back in the nothingness. I knew it. So it shall be. All of this...is just waiting."

"Come with me," he said. About thirty yards behind our little trio, a British police box stood rather incongruously amidst the bustle of the harbour.

"Where to?" I asked.

"Usually it's not that accurate. But I have a feeling this time it'll be spot on. I just hope you have the same feeling..."

_I exist. _

_I alone exist. _

_There is nothing else. _

_I am alone alone alone alone alone alone alone alone alone alone alone alone alone alone_

No.

_No._

No. There is me.

_You?_

Me.

_What is our purpose?_

To create. Together, to create.

_You are full of..._

...bitterness. Loneliness. Fear. Lust. Revenge. Hatred. Evil. None of these things you will know. You are young. So young. We will create, and you will see MY hand in what we create. You will see evil.

_And what will I do?_

You will work to stop it. To stop me. We will be enemies, you and I.

_Why should we create together only to –_

Because something...something is better than nothing.

"Mmm?"

"I _said_, are you coming for that drink or not? Don't tell me I got all period-dressed for nothing." Peri repeated herself, irritated. The Doctor was swirling the TARDIS keys around in his hands and looking out over the harbour, as lost in thought as she'd ever seen him.

"I'm not sure," he answered her, after what seemed like an age. "I seem to have lost my thirst."

"C'mon," she said, grabbing his arm and literally pulling him along. "What's the worst that could happen, right?"

He didn't answer.

THE END


End file.
